Hours of Service: Are Black Boxes the Enforcement Answer?

by Deborah Lockridge

There are strong indications out of Washington, D.C., that the U.S. Dept. of Transportation will require some form of automated logbooks for monitoring compliance with its new hours-of-service regime. On the surface, it seems like a good idea. “Paperless” logs would be a natural progression as trucking becomes more high-tech. There would fewer paperwork hassles and less room for inconsistent interpretation of the rules among enforcement officers and drivers. Heck, drivers would not have to worry about keeping logbooks current or accurate. The trip recorder would do the job for them.

Ah, if it were only so simple.

To create a level playing field, hundreds of thousands of trucks would need to be equipped with some sort of standard recording device.
Conventional electronic trip recorders on the market today can be costly, depending on the type of data you need to collect and the tools-hardware and software-required to do the job. This, too, is a matter of great debate: what kind of vehicle-generated data is most important? How much access to information should enforcement officials have? How is that information used once it’s been retrieved? Of course, the overriding question here is this: can electronic logs actually prevent driver fatigue or improve truck safety?

For Canadians, the potential of a trip-recorder mandate creates further discord among the hours-of-service regimes in the United States and here at a time when the two countries had hoped for rules that were simpler to follow and enforce. There are no plans to incorporate a trip-recorder mandate into a new hour-of-service standard under development here.

“We’ve looked at the value of electronic recording devices but aren’t prepared to endorse them,” says Transport Canada senior policy advisor Brian Orrbine, who leads a task force of regulators that will finalize a new hours-of-service standard here before year’s end.

“We have fundamental questions that need to be answered. First, when we talk about ‘black boxes,’ it’s in the context of airline accident investigations. Experts interpret data that can be used to shape transport policy or create industry standards that affect public safety at large.

“When people talk about black boxes in trucking, the discussion centres on hours-of-service compliance, but then other things creep into the mix: accident investigations, insurance and liability issues, truck speeds, vehicle weights,” Orrbine says. “We have to figure out how the industry and public would best be served by this technology before we start making policy about it. For the industry, the investment would be significant. I’d want to feel assured that the impact on public safety would be significant as well.”

The idea that Canada has no intention of a black-box mandate raises concerns about how Canadian cross-border carriers would be able to bear the extra costs involved with deploying electronic logs and training employees how to use them-while maintaining a separate system for operations inside Canada.

DRIVING FORCES

In the States, regulators have been far more aggressive about onboard recording devices. For nearly a decade, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has recommended a requirement for black boxes on trucks-and met resistance from the DOT, which has preferred to work with the trucking industry on a well-reasoned standard rather than force mandates down its throat. But last year, as part of federal truck-safety legislation, DOT asked that Congress consider making onboard recorders mandatory on commercial trucks.

“Falsification of truck drivers’ hours-of-service logs is a very serious problem,” DOT inspector general Kenneth Mead told the Senate subcommittee on transportation last fall during hearings on the creation of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration last year.
“It is linked to the more fundamental problem of driver fatigue. If the use of electronic recorders is not directed legislatively, then it should be recognized that Congress would be relying on the new agency to issue a rulemaking governing the use of electronic recorders and including specific privacy protections.”

Parents Against Tired Truckers, an industry critic based in Maine, supports mandatory onboard recorders to automatically track driver hours. “We’ve heard so often about truck drivers carrying two and three sets of logbooks, which are easily falsified,” says PATT spokesman Steve Izer. Electronic logs, he says, “would make it a lot harder to cheat, and it would be a lot harder for dispatchers or companies to push a driver beyond what he’s supposed to do.”

Current U.S. federal regulations, in place since 1988 (49 CFR 395.15), allow optional use of onboard computers to electronically track driver logs. In 1998, Nebraska-based Werner Enterprises embarked on a two-year federal pilot project to test its own proprietary paperless logs-using satellite communications and positioning to track driver hours without using an onboard computer such as those specified in 49 CFR 395.15.

Unlike electronic log systems already in use and authorized by the 1988 regulations, Werner’s system uses satellite location technology to track truck movement and driver hours without an onboard computer, the first major use of such technology by a longhaul truckload fleet.
Werner’s IT group spent several years developing the system to work with the Qualcomm OmniTRACS satellite communications system. It’s based on heavily customized McLeod fleet management software, which translates the Qualcomm information into electronic logs. Drivers can get a daily or eight-day recap through the system on demand.

The company has been testing the system, initially alongside traditional paper logs, since 1995. Werner won’t release specific numbers, but “we think it has some monetary benefits,” says Werner executive vice-president Richard S. Reiser. The system allows for more productivity and easier compliance with federal regulations. And company officials believe drivers like the system so much that it will help them recruit and keep drivers who don’t want to deal with paperwork hassles.

“We really wanted a better way to proactively manage our drivers’ time,” Reiser says. Instead of relying on a driver to alert them to the fact that they are out of hours, dispatchers can see on a screen whether a driver has enough hours to deliver the load. “It keeps us from assigning a load to a driver where he has no choice but to either be late or to violate hours-of-service regulations to get it there on time,” Reiser says.

“We run completely legal and have plenty of rest,” says Connie Erickson, who with her husband, Jeff, drives team for the company. No more falling behind and having to catch up from memory-which, along with having to round to the nearest 15-minute interval, may actually cheat the driver out of legal driving time. And the system makes it much more difficult for dispatchers to push drivers to deliver a hot load even if it means driving too many hours, sometimes to the point of dangerous fatigue.

The Werner system is not without critics. Last year, safety advocacy group Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways complained that it has glaring loopholes. It automatically records truck idle time of more than two hours as sleeper berth time; a driver could be unloading, or waiting to unload, and the system could log him as sleeping. In addition, speeds of less than 20 mph are calculated by dividing the distance traveled by the average miles per hour. CRASH says this means a driver could sit in heavy traffic when his logs say he’s sleeping.

The system does make assumptions about what the driver is doing when the truck is not moving, Reiser explains. But if those assumptions aren’t correct, the driver is responsible for keying in the right information using the Qualcomm keyboard.

“There is no camera in the truck to tell us when a driver is actually in the sleeper berth,” says CEO Clarence Werner. “For that information, we must rely, as do the paper logs, on the information provided by the drivers.

“We have over 6500 trucks on the road each day. If a few of those trucks are caught in a traffic jam where they are forced to spend hours going only a short distance, and that driver fails to accurately record the true facts, that driver’s hours may be recorded inaccurately for that time period. To suggest that somehow the problem would not have arisen under a paper log system is absurd.”

There have also been reports of problems with enforcement officials. Werner drivers carry copies of a certificate proving they are authorized to drive without a paper log, which they are supposed to give to an inspector. If the officer still wants to see a log, drivers can show them an eight-day recap of their hours on the Qualcomm computer screen.

If that’s still not good enough, drivers can send a message to Werner headquarters through the Qualcomm and get the logs faxed to the number specified by the officer. The process isn’t always smooth.

John Harmon with the Tennessee Highway Patrol surprised the NTSB earlier this year when he testified that not only enforcement officials but drivers themselves were not familiar with electronic log systems, especially the Werner system. “A driver last week didn’t know how to show me the last seven days,” Harmon said. “I told him if he couldn’t, I’d place him out of service. He played with it until he got it to pull up, but he didn’t even know how he did it.”

BIG BROTHER

Despite the potential benefits, most of the trucking industry is hesitant about adopting electronic logs-and especially about having them mandated. The Motor Freight Carriers Association, which represents major unionized less-than-truckload companies, opposes mandatory onboard recorders for tracking driver hours.

“The unionized LTL carriers do not have hours-of-service violations in any wholesale way,” says MFCA president Timothy Lynch. Less than 1% of MFCA members are put out of service for driver violations, which can include hours-of-service violations as well as logbook and drug or alcohol violations.

“If we are not violating the rules in the first place,” he says, “onboard recorders won’t improve safety one iota.” The reason: LTL fleets have their terminal networks set up for regular runs based on the current hours-of-service rules and speed limits. In addition, hours of service are typically spelled out in labor agreements. “If a terminal manager ordered a driver to exceed the hours of service, it would quickly lead to a grievance,” Lynch says.

Even for trucking operations where electronic logs might make sense, critics say the benefits do not justify their cost-especially for the small trucking companies that make up the majority of the industry.
The National Private Truck Council, in a letter to NTSB, notes that at an average cost of $1500 to $2000, the total industry cost to outfit the four million trucks in the United States grossing more than 10,000 pounds would be at least $6 billion to $8 billion US.

That figure does not include other equipment that would be needed, such as an equipment tracking system, nor any maintenance or training costs.
These numbers don’t take into account the fact that 80% of motor carriers run very small operations-fewer than 20 trucks-and lack the “back office” equipment and expertise needed to make such systems work.

Proponents, however, say the cost would go down rapidly if electronic logs were mandated. Current systems tend to do paperless logs as an add-on to productivity/equipment management systems. If electronic logs are mandated, it’s likely that some companies will develop bare-bones alternatives that would meet the regulations.

MATTERS OF PRIVACY

No matter how cheap they are, onboard recorders that track hours of service raise concerns about what will be done with the data collected.
“We’re concerned that the rights afforded to rail and airline industry employees are going to get thrown out the door,” says former Truckload Carriers Association president Lana Batts. In those industries, she says, information collected by the electronics cannot be used for enforcement purposes, only accident reconstruction.

“We need a uniform policy regarding under what circumstances they can access information and what they can do with it,” says Batts.
Another concern about the use of data from onboard recorders involves liability and litigation issues. Say a car darts in front of a truck. The trucker tries to avoid that car and in the process hits another vehicle.

Because the “black box” records only the truck’s activity and the truck driver’s hours, and passenger cars don’t have that kind of record, the information could be subpoenaed and “used as a hammer in legal proceedings,” says Greg Thompson, a spokesman for U.S. Xpress, Chattanooga, Tenn.-based truckload carrier. “Maybe the driver made a move that looks bad on the box, but it was the right move to make to keep from killing somebody.”

Critics say automatic, electronic, and paperless logs miss the boat in that they do not truly combat driver fatigue and are not proactive safety tools.

“We think that’s a very expensive option that misses the mark completely in terms of addressing the driver fatigue issue,” says Todd Spencer, vice-president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association.

“These systems do not measure fatigue or help a driver know when fatigue may be creeping up on him. They’re not something that will accurately record hours worked, because they don’t measure the time spent in non-driving activities. And if there’s one thing we now know, it’s that the fatigue issue isn’t the driving-it’s the time involved in non-driving activities.”


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